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This article states:

But somehow, despite all of the reasons it shouldn’t work, it does.

Scientists at NASA just confirmed it.

Now in this question - it is strongly suggested that this doesn't work.

So at best, Shawyer has invented a very inefficient and expensive fan.

Even further - this answer states:

Shawyer's "analysis" is a mess, incoherent and deeply confused about fundamental aspects of relativity.

My question is: Has NASA confirmed that Roger Shawyer's EmDrive thruster works?

Edit:

There may be an answer here. I just don't know what it means.

Edit #2

I don't believe this is a duplicate of the other question - as it is not clear how much to trust NASA's engineers - or what their comment actually means.

Community
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hawkeye
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    sounds like a question for [skeptics.se] rather than here – John Dvorak Sep 12 '14 at 03:12
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    Well IMO if you ask questions on Skeptics, they're bound to shoot it down because they like shooting stuff down (...home home on the rifle range, where I deer, ducks and antelope slay..). So also try the space nerds too (space exploration stack exchange) http://space.stackexchange.com/ someone there is bound to have given this a thorough going over. – Selene Routley Sep 12 '14 at 03:28
  • Based on your first source by NASA, the only thing that has been confirmed is that absolutely nothing has been measured that can be published... because absolutely nothing of scientific value has been published. That sounds like pseudo-science hiding behind a NASA blanket to me. – CuriousOne Sep 12 '14 at 03:31
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    Oh dear not these clowns again. Every name you see on that NASA paper is a fraud. Whether or not NASA has given them its blessing, no amount of bureaucratic stupidity can change the laws of physics, and the laws of physics are very clear that one cannot violate conservation of momentum as this device claims to be able to do. –  Sep 12 '14 at 03:31
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    A couple of minor points of correction: (1) It was a few engineers at NASA, not "NASA" as a whole. (2) What that group tested was not Shawyer's EmDrive. That's obviously crackpot! What they tested was Guido Fetta's "Cannae Drive". As the name suggests, (said best with a fake Scottish accent) "it cannae drive". It too is crackpot. – David Hammen Sep 12 '14 at 03:45
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    @WetSavannaAnimalakaRodVance - This question has already been asked at http://space.stackexchange.com. I already had my say on this subject at that site at that site. To summarize my thoughts on this concept, "call me unimpressed." – David Hammen Sep 12 '14 at 03:52

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No, NASA has not confirmed that. What NASA has confirmed, again, is that it has some rather nutty folks working for it.

CuriousOne
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    NASA has funded "non-standard" research at a low level from it's very start. Sometimes this research has paid off, sometimes in a very big way. (The research that did pay off was breaking the laws of engineering rather than the laws of physics.) The problem is that the bean counters who shell out the beans don't know beans about the difference between what is possible theoretically but hard practically versus what is blatantly impossible. – David Hammen Sep 12 '14 at 04:01
  • NASA has been far less innovative than most people think. Almost every technology they use in space is at least a decade behind the state of the art. That's by design, because there is usually not enough engineering and reliability data for new technologies to make the outcome of a once in a lifetime mission dependent on it. I don't know what you mean by "the laws of engineering". The only law of engineering that NASA likes to break consistently is that a design should be as cheap as possible, but not cheaper. They overshoot on both sides of that "law" all the time. – CuriousOne Sep 12 '14 at 04:12
  • Oh please. How many other organizations have planted human footprints on the Moon? (None.) How many other organizations have built a manned space station? (One.) How many other organizations have emplaced a 900 kg rover on the surface of Mars? (None.) How many other organizations have sent missions to Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, or Pluto? (None.) How many other organizations have sent vehicles outside the solar system? (None.) – David Hammen Sep 12 '14 at 04:34
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    And yet, NASA flew to the moon with mostly commercially available technology of the time. It is easy to mistake the size of a project for its novelty. Novelty keeps holding things up, because one has to debug the technology first, before one can use it. Now, what most people don't know is that NASA has an incredible treasure trove of non-trivial information about system reliability. Like... do you know how to tie cables down properly, so that they withstand vibration and thousands of heating cooling cycles in zero gravity? I didn't, until I read the NASA handbook about it! – CuriousOne Sep 12 '14 at 04:40
  • And yet that is pure nonsense. What "commercially available technology" are you writing about? The Saturn V? The lander? The reentry vehicle? The Kalman filter technology that was developed explicitly to make the moon landing possible? The microcomputers whose development was funded largely by NASA? The first commercial microprocessor chip didn't exist until 1971. – David Hammen Sep 12 '14 at 05:20
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    @DavidHammen: You may want to read up on the technology used in the Apollo program a little. Of course NASA bought all of those parts from industrial suppliers. What did you think they were doing? Even the Kalman filter algorithm was known theoretically years before the Apollo program even began. Its application for guidance doesn't even comprise an original invention. Microcomputers were not developed by NASA and microprocessor chips were originally developed for terminals, not for spaceflight. Please, let's stay with the facts here. – CuriousOne Sep 12 '14 at 05:48
  • You are the one who needs to read up on things. NASA contracted out the work; for the most part, that's how the government works. Just because work is contracted out does not mean that what is purchased is "commercially available technology." Even much of the development of the first atomic bombs was contracted out, and those certainly were not "commercially available technology." The vast majority of scientists, engineers, and lab personnel at Los Alamos, Hanford, and Clinton Laboratories (now Oak Ridge) were not government employees. – David Hammen Sep 12 '14 at 12:11
  • @DavidHammen: Please read up on the technologies used. And don't forget to find out who invented velcro. Hint: it wasn't NASA, either. – CuriousOne Sep 12 '14 at 17:31
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    Let us continue this discussion in chat. – David Hammen Sep 12 '14 at 17:55